Web giant Yahoo has operated its own e-mail service (free and paid) for many years, and many of us at one point in time have owned (or still own) a Yahoo email address. As you can imagine, a huge number of people all around the world subscribed to Yahoo's services, used the accounts for a while, and then abandoned the account.

The problem for Yahoo and users who actually want to use the Yahoo e-mail service is that having millions of dormant accounts taking up usable names kept some people from using the e-mail service.

As a result, Yahoo announced that it plans to recycle inactive user IDs. Yahoo's plan would take any accounts that have been inactive for more than 12 months and make them available for use by other users.

[Image Source: Inquirer.net]

Privacy advocates are now rallying against Yahoo's plans saying that by recycling inactive user IDs, Yahoo could allow spammers and other nefarious users to assume the identity of the previous account holder. Yahoo says that it has safeguards in place and is coordinating with other web companies such as Google and Amazon to minimize any risk of identity theft.

"[The possibility of identity theft is] something we are aware of and we've gone through a bunch of different steps to mitigate that concern," said Dylan Casey, a senior director for consumer platforms. "We put a lot of thought, a lot of resources dedicated to this project."

Yahoo will also be unsubscribing inactive accounts from all mailing lists to prevent the new account holders from getting content they didn't ask for.

"Can I tell you with 100 percent certainty that it's absolutely impossible for anything to happen? No. But we're going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that nothing bad happens to our users," Casey added.

Yahoo requires you to sign up for their email to join their other services, like their email message lists. I'm on a couple Yahoo message lists (not my choice - the people who started them chose Yahoo to host their list), so I have a Yahoo email address.

But I never login to my yahoo account. I just set up my yahoo mail account to forward all mail to my real email address, and get my message list mails that way. I would be pretty upset if yahoo gave away my email address simply because I hadn't logged into it in ~8 years.